Going Jack

 

Image courtesy Lion International

When I served in a rifle platoon a very long time ago, one of the worst insults you could offer to a fellow soldier was to refer to him as "Jack".

The term came from the phrase "F**k you Jack, I'm all right". 

Essentially, any soldier going "Jack" was either selfish, stupid, or both. 

Stupid, because our lives depended on each other. 

Selfish, because he was putting considerations about his own well-being ahead of that of his comrades.

A good example would have been a digger who coughed, sneezed, smoked, snored or farted in an all-night ambush. Such a soldier would have been given a swift kick up the backside by an NCO (or perhaps a fellow soldier, depending on who got to him first).

That principle of collective loyalty and cooperation is fundamental to success in any undertaking where disunity is death, and it is illustrated so clearly when we look at statistics emanating from the USA, where states with high vaccination rates are suffering far fewer Covid 19 deaths than those where vaccine hesitancy is rampant. 

It is almost a perfect negative correlation.

And yet we observe people of little brain and miniscule moral comprehension taking to the street in the name of "freedom" in this country. In the process, they have casually desecrated the Shrine of Remembrance.

The "freedom" they're advocating is the freedom to jeopardise the well-being of the group in favour of the selfish demands of the individual. I've blogged previously about how that glib notion has fallen in a heap with the advent of the pandemic.

We have also observed the phenomenon (relatively new to Australia) of rent seeking politicians appropriating the anger and frustration inevitably generated by the restrictions to their own ends.

This is one cultural trend that should be swiftly booted back across the Pacific from whence it came.

It is divisive, destructive and dangerous.

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Under the Radar

Cartoon courtesy The Guardian

The story of the week is Australia's move to acquire nuclear powered submarines.

But under the radar, is a much more important story, that is all about taking our foreign policy priorities back to the sixties.

Let's first examine the outcome of the decision to cancel the French project and consider the realities. Hugh White does just that.

The likely acquisition date of replacements for the Collins class boats is now further down the track than it was for the abandoned French project. We're talking about the 2040s. Let's hope our enemies, imagined or real, are prepared to give us that much start.

In addition, it is going to cost more, even before we compensate the French for the cancellation.

As Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said a few days ago -

"The irony is that when we chose the French-designed submarine a few years ago we actually took a nuclear-powered submarine and have been spending millions of dollars turning it into a diesel submarine."

So we have moved from modifying a nuclear powered boat to take diesel electric propulsion (a complicated and expensive proposition) to going full circle and deciding that we really wanted nuclear all along. That is at least bizarre, and almost unbelievable.

But it's real...

What is far more significant is the return to the strategic alignments of the sixties. A glance at a map reveals that Australia is located in the South Pacific, a very long way from both Pennsylvania Avenue and Downing Street.

We are much closer to Jakarta, Singapore and Hanoi. Yet, apparently there was no consultation with any of our neighbours. There was also no negotiation with the French at government to government level. The French are more than a little miffed - hardly surprising.

Perhaps if some real consultation had taken place, we may have been able to set up a deal where we leased the nuclear powered version of the Barracuda from France whilst we were waiting for the Yanks and Brits to get their act into gear.

As it is, we seem to have come out of the whole debacle with more expense, greater delays, and some seriously fed up neighbours.

But most significantly, any real sovereignty that we had in terms of our relationship with the USA has gone down the plughole. Perhaps we could be optimistic and hope that in the fullness of time, the acquisition of these boats may allow us to develop our own independent deterrent, rather than depending on the Americans, but how much time do we have?

As it is now, we are tied to them, and to their capricious foreign policy which bangs backwards and forwards like a dunny door in the wind driven by their dysfunctional and erratic domestic politics. 

If I'm still around when these subs finally hit the water under their own steam, (I'll be in my nineties), I'll be fascinated to observe what form of leader occupies the White House. Recent history has shown that the Yanks have the capacity to "elect"* complete snake oil merchants to that position.

And there will be five different POTUS elected between now and 2040. By the law of averages, at least one of them is likely to be a lunatic.

You only need to consider the results of domestic driven interventions and withdrawals in recent foreign wars (Vietnam Iraq, and Afghanistan) to understand the utter incompetence of the Americans. And we went along with them each time.

I lived the consequences of that incompetence fifty years ago in Vietnam. 

Let's hope that no more young Australians will have to do the same in the future.

*Probably the wrong word to use to describe the process.

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Israel and Delta

                                           Pic courtesy WSJ

Israel's experience with the Delta strain of the virus, and the success or otherwise of its vaccination programme is instructive for Australia, given the likely rocky road ahead on the road map set out by the PM and the NSW Premier.

As this is written, Israel is dealing with a third wave of the virus, specifically the Delta variant. On September 9th 2021, Israel reported 5861 new cases and 6 new deaths. This contrasted with the situation in 2020 when the country went into lockdown averaging 4000 new daily infections, and daily deaths reached a high of 101 on January 20th 2021.

So the rate of infection is higher in 2021, but the death rate lower. The other change since a few months ago is that the lockdowns in Israel were lifted prior to the increased rate of infections.

Because we are not comparing like with like in two aspects (a different more infectious variant and lighter restrictions) it is difficult to come to definite conclusions, but some things seem evident.

1.  More people are becoming infected, but fewer are being hospitalised and dying.

2.  The lockdowns were effective in reducing transmission, and lifting them has increased transmission.

3. More people are recovering, but it is too early to understand the nature of that recovery.

All of this suggests caution. 

This caution should emanate not only from the figures above, but also from the possibility (or likelihood) that new variants will emerge. That is, after all, how viruses behave.

Vaccination is not the silver bullet, but it does seem to help. It needs to be remembered that even in Israel, only 61.1% of people are fully vaccinated. 

That doesn't bode well for Australia, where the figure stands at 32.6% fully vaccinated as this is posted.

Song for Adam Goodes

Apart from the fact that this is a great song, it has an interesting back story.

It was written by Paul Kelly for the documentary "The Final Quarter", which looks at the last few years of Goodes playing career.

It won the Best Original Song Composed for the Screen in the 2019 Screen Music Awards.

Because Goodes' had the temerity to object to the crowd booing every time he touched the ball, he came in for a lot of criticism.

Indigenous players are supposed to accept that casual racism without a murmur.

He didn't. Well done that man.....

The song is about his mother, and how her values forged his success as a footballer and Australian of the Year.

  

Good News and Bad News

Pic courtesy Al Jazeera

Some elements of the old joke hold in relation to Afghanistan, but the good news pales somewhat in relation to the cost of the twenty year commitment.

We lost forty-one Australian soldiers, and that will always be the greatest cost. The damage done to all who served there, and the aftermath of the defeat also comes at enormous cost.

Vietnam veterans are only too familiar with that.

Frankly, the reputation of the US is neither here nor there. That reputation was permanently damaged in March 2003 when the Neocons invaded Iraq on a lie in order to "get square" for 9/11. What was David Kilcullen's reaction?

There has always been something entirely childish about US responses to terrorism, which in the final analysis, ensures that it will continue to be a problem into the future. Arrogance and ignorance creates its own issues.

All presidents since Bush have been trying to extract the US military from Afghanistan, and it would not have mattered in the long run who was in the White House when it happened. The fact that the deal that Trump "negotiated" included no consultation with the people or government of Afghanistan is more than a little responsible for the chaos we have seen during the last week or two.

But there is some good news.

No more American or Australians will die in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan we know now is a very different country from what it was twenty years ago. There is a generation of young Afghans who have known a different experience. 

Afghani women know a different way of life, and most young women have had some experience of schooling.

How these changes will play out will depend on a whole heap of imponderables, most of them poorly understood by westerners. 

There is very little we can do about it, so pragmatic optimism is as viable as despair.

What is absolutely essential is that we don't treat Afghanistan veterans in the same shabby manner as Vietnam veterans were treated, until they took reconciliation into their own hands with the 1987 Welcome Home march.

The other essential is that we treat Afghan refugees as generously as we treated the Vietnamese in the late seventies and early eighties. Since the poisonous atmosphere created by the Tampa incident in August 2001, I sincerely doubt that possibility.

The Thrill is Gone

For years (foolishly perhaps) I've been lurking on a blog that described itself as "Libertarian". It was fun whilst it lasted. Thanks, Professor Davidson.

It's gone. It persists only in archive. And this little blog survives, gentle reader. Darwin was spot on...

At the same time, a pandemic has killed six hundred and twenty-seven thousand in the Land of the Free. It's reasonable to conclude that the two situations (the deaths of over half a million Americans, and the demise of a "Libertarian" blog) are linked.

Libertarianism has always been a romantically destructive philosophy. It is associated these days with the American Right, but ironically has its origins in the later works of Marx and Engels (Ernesto Screpanti, Libertarian communism: Marx Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007).

Its ideological base has been co-opted by politicians such as Rand Paul and many Americans who admire the thought of writers like Ayn Rand. There is a depth of irony in this association, of course. You have only to read a few of Ayn Rand's quotes on  Libertarianism to understand that - 

Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication when that fits their purpose.

Libertarianism has always been impossibly romantic, espoused by dilettantes, and deemed fashionable by the shallow. It has always lacked substance and pragmatism, and of course, as a system of association and organisation, is entirely impossible. It is essentially the refuge of the intellectually lazy and the naive. God knows there's a few of those loose in the Land of the Free, and many of them post in the lunatic Right blogosphere.

That has been revealed so clearly by the consequence of the pandemic across the Pacific, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the attempted application of science to its management. The non-existent US health system has a lot to do with it, of course.

An even deeper irony holds when you consider that by most recognised criteria, The USA is not up there on international comparisons when it comes to actual Liberty.

The 2021 Index of Economic Freedom which promotes economic opportunity, individual empowerment, and prosperity puts the US at twentieth on the scale, well below countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Ireland. 

And I didn't use this post as an excuse to play some BB King. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, but the thrill of Glibertarianism has indeed gone...

 

The War on Terror - Guest Post - by Panda General

 

                                               Pic courtesy the denverchannel.com

I have decided to add a little variety by providing a guest poster. This person is less than half my age and has a unique viewpoint. He provides an original point of view, and his analysis is comprehensive. Let me know what you think.

 Though it's not really *over* over, I think it's fair to say that we're reaching a point where the War on Terror will no longer be the primary paradigm through which western powers engage militarily with the world in short order. So what I am thinking at the moment is - how will future historians define this era? Where does it start? Where will it end? 

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US seem like the obvious starting point - however, there had certainly been related actions to these attacks leading back to the 80's. Osama Bin Laden had officially declared war on the United States in 1996 - and he had actually already organized attacks on US targets repeatedly before 9/11 (most notably embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole near Yemen). 9/11 is probably when these conflicts entered the greater public consciousness, but even afterwards the goal of fighting terrorism became murky. Did they mean terrorism as a phenomenon? Did they mean Islamist terrorism specifically? Did they mean states that had sponsored terrorism? 

The answer was, of course, all of the above, but if that's the case then things go back much further than 2001. The countries that ended up on the 'axis of evil' - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, were all countries that had had antagonisms for the US stretching back decades (back to the 50's in the case of North Korea). There were also secondary 'axis' countries - Cuba, Libya, and Syria. Ideologically, none of these countries have that much in common, exemplifying a series of world views that include Marxist-Leninism, Ba'athism, Khomeini-brand Islamism, Juche, and whatever the hell Qadhafi thought he was doing that week. They weren't really allies (Iraq and Iran, in particular, were sworn enemies) and had few formal connections or organised alliances between them. All they really had in common were the fact that the US had beef with them. 

Also notable, none of them really ideologically aligned with Osama Bin Laden's own perspective - Salafist Jihadism. No state was really. The Salafi movement had been around for a while, but it really began to pick up steam in the 80's, when various states including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan essentially started exporting it throughout the Islamic world, pumping money and Wahhabist clerics (the particularly conservative brand of Islam that prevails in the KSA) into every mosque and madras they could - partially for religious reasons, partially as an ideological counter to Soviet Communism, Arab Socialism, and Iran's newly emergent Shia-infused Islamism. 

The combination of the Siege of the Grand Mosque by the sons of Ikwhan fanatics, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan meant that much of the 80's was spent pushing this ideology everywhere they could. and it became very strong in the Islamic world. 

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the collapse of the USSR, these guys basically reached the height of their prestige within the Islamic world - there were seen as heroes who had destroyed an evil atheistic empire. Foreign veterans of the Afghanistan war returned to their home countries and used this momentum to attempt their own overthrows there - this happened in Algeria most notably, but also in Tajikistan. Islamist-aligned officers overthrew the government in Sudan, setting up an Islamist-themed military dictatorship. 

The Taliban defeated the Afghan Warlords, remnants of the Mujahedeen, and set up their brand of Deobundi Islamist Fundamentalism in the country. Salafist Jihadists joined in secessionist and ethnic conflicts in Chechnya (Russia), Xinjiang (China), Kashmir (India), Palestine, the Philippines, and Bosnia. A lot of these insurgencies would become targets of the War on Terror paradigm after 9/11, but at the time most Americans, in particular, had no idea they were even a thing. 

So where does it start? It's fair to say its origins lie in the Cold War. but where does this conflict actually begin? In the 50's in Egypt, when Nasser banned the Muslim Brotherhood and drove them underground (and into more militant formations)? In '79, when the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Grand Siege of Mecca all occurred within a few months of each other, leading to the violent (and state-sponsored) radicalization of Sunni militants? in '96, when OBL declared war on the US, marking it as a direct target for these movements? Or 9/11, when the largest terrorist attacks in history bought this conflict to world attention? 

Trying to map things after this gets even murkier - trying to figure out how a solid *end* point might be murkier still. A lot of the states the US has problems with are still around, but blocs have been forming between them and more powerful nations. Salafi terrorism is still around, but its ability to strike much outside of Islamic-Majority countries is becoming increasingly limited. US security infrastructure is in the midst of pivoting away from focus on those groups, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, and no doubt minimising their footprint in Iraq before too long. They aren't looking at the little fish so much anymore - Russia and China have captured their imagination far more (though they remain, as ever, fixated on Iran and Cuba). 

This is a very different world to the one that dominated headlines for most of the 00's. 

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